Belfast Has Best UK Mobile Coverage Of Any Major UK City But Where’s London?

Belfast has the best mobile service of any major UK metropolitan area, according to new figures from RootMetrics, while improvements in London were not enough to push the capital further up the table.

The independent network testing firm said that improvements had been made in most of the 16 locations it looked at, measuring each on overall performance, network reliability, speed, data performance, call performance and texts.

RootMetrics gives each operator a ‘Rootscore’ out of 100. This takes into account different factors such as speed, reliability, calls and data, with the most important criteria weighted more heavily.

UK mobile coverage

With businesses becoming increasingly dependent on mobile technology, the rankings could be an indicator as to which city might be most attractive to set up shop.

Belfast will be happy with its overall score of 97, ahead of Manchester on 96.9, Liverpool on 96.6, Birmingham on 95.6 and Sheffield on 95.4. Belfast, Manchester and Liverpool all finished in the top three for every category except calls – where the party was gatecrashed by Coventry at the expense of Belfast – and texts, where Liverpool swapped places with Birmingham.

London’s overall score of 93.9 placed it above only Bristol, Hull and Cardiff. The same three areas were the worst in all categories, except for texts where Glasgow dropped and Bristol rose up the table.

A recent report from OpenSignal, which crowdsources mobile tests from users, suggested UK 4G availability was improving as network investments by all four operators paid off.

It should come as no surprise that EE was found to have the fastest speeds and best availability however. EE was the first 4G service to go live in the UK and has the widest coverage and most advanced network of any operator ever since.